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ANY WEEK THAT BERNIE MADOFF GOES TO JAIL and has an excellent shot at spending the next 150 years there, or that
General Motorsgm 0.3305785123966942%General Motors Co.U.S.: NYSEUSD36.42
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4.171821305841925Market Cap
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753874More quote details and news »gminYour ValueYour ChangeShort position
tells Uncle Sam it doesn't need two billion more of the taxpayers' hard-earned smackers (well, not just yet anyway), or that the stock market goes up four whole days in a row, or that Jim Cramer gets his ears boxed by Jon Stewart, can't be all bad.

Amid such an awesome, luminous constellation of splendid and unaccustomed uplift, it's tough to single out one piece of good news that outshines the rest. But our vote would have to go to the miracle leak that revived investor spirits and restored their hopes, along with a measure of happiness and even flickerings of greed -- faint, but welcome nonetheless -- as moribund stock markets awoke from one end of the planet to the other.

For this miracle leak the world is indebted to Vikram Pandit, the CEO of
Citigroup,
c 1.8455807653234%Citigroup Inc.U.S.: NYSEUSD60.15
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368706More quote details and news »cinYour ValueYour ChangeShort position
who -- as you probably already know (any a good journalist, we take considerable pleasure in telling you what you already know) -- wrote an internal memo that was solely for the eyes of anyone who can read (which may very well exclude a number of his fellow bankers).

Besides breathing new life into equities virtually everywhere they're traded, the leak can lay claim to being miraculous on another score, too. For truly amazing is the fact that its contents would incite anyone with even the most cursory knowledge of finance to buy stocks.

Essentially, Mr. Pandit's memo relayed the less-than-startling revelation that if you disregard, as any polite person is obligated to, the $301 billion of toxic assets sitting atop its balance sheet like a grinning monster waiting to pounce and the something like $45 billion our munificent government out of the goodness of its heart has poured into Citi's rather strained coffers, plus a few other pesky details, it's making a profit!

It could be, of course, that what so elated investors was not so much Mr. Pandit's profits epiphany, but the possible broader inference to be drawn from it: In calculating earnings, don't muddy things up by including costs and taxes and other piddling annoyances. On that basis, investors, staring wistfully at their drooping portfolios, might have figured -- their pulses suddenly bounding -- that maybe those dead dogs might fetch something after all, and rushed to average down.

The question does come to mind, however: If Citi is, as Mr. Pandit asserts, turning a profit, why has it been putting the arm on the government for those big-buck infusions? And, while we're asking, why has its stock been hovering around $1 and the cost of insuring it against default risen 200% so far this year?

Believe us, we're not trying to spoil anyone's fun. The memo, whatever its flaws, undeniably turned around a market that almost everyone agreed was horribly oversold. (Any number of those folks have been saying that for months and months; we trust they were not foolish enough to act on their advice.) The only thing that makes us a little leery of the idea that we're actually witnessing one of those brisk bear-market rallies that carry stocks 20%-to-25% higher is that good-old-everyone expects it.

The fundamentals remain pretty bleak. Jobs continue to vanish at an alarming rate. Consumers are under remorseless pressure, psychologically and financially. The collapse in housing is still very much in force, and so is everything bad that issues from it.

None of this precludes a nice bounce. But it virtually preordains that a nice bounce will be followed by a not-so-nice break.

"THE BULLISH CONSENSUS IS 'RHUBARB, poppycock, bilge, balderdash and piffle.' " Thus spake not Zarathustra but Albert Edwards, who, thank heavens, is better-humored than Friedrich Nietzsche. Even so, like the old German philosopher, in utterance he favors plenty of shock and a paucity of awe.

The particular bullish consensus to which Albert, who labors for Soci&eacute;t&eacute; G&eacute;n&eacute;rale, took such gentle exception has to do with China and, more specifically, whether it could artfully dodge the wicked economic slump that is rapidly embracing the globe. He voiced his decidedly unequivocal doubts in a commentary penned a couple of weeks ago, and, so far, he has had no reason for regrets.

Yes, we're quite aware that the Beijing brass insists that once its half-a-trillion-dollar-plus stimulus program is in full swing, the country will start to race ahead big-time again, and wind up the year with 8% growth. Chinese data are often spongy, especially when they make for unpleasant reading. And we don't think we're being ungenerous when we suggest that you might do worse than give the official estimate of this year's GDP a haircut of, oh, say, 50%.

This less-than-exuberant prospect was only reinforced by the recent disclosure that China's pride and joy -- its extraordinary trade balance -- has rather abruptly taken a big dive -- indeed, the worst ever: to $4.8 billon in February, from $39.1 billion in January and over $8 billion in the same month last year. Exports, the dynamo of China's spectacular growth since it began its true emergence as an economic power some three or so decades ago, shrank by a formidable 25.7% last month, accompanied by a whopping 24.1% drop in imports.

As to the much-heralded $585 billion stimulus effort that's supposed to kick-start the Sino-economy, it appears to be directed largely to infrastructure, where it is least needed, rather than to consumption, which could use juicing up.

Premier Wen Jiabao allowed on Friday, at the wind-up of a powwow of the National People's Congress (the moniker of what passes for a legislative body in China's one-party-rules-all political system), that his nation's economy had lost some of its "vitality" and, with an admirable lack of subtlety, laid the blame on Uncle Sam's profligate borrowing and spending.

Mr. Wen has cause to be, as he put it, "a little worried," since China holds, at last count, some $696 billion of those borrowings in the form of U.S. Treasuries. From an investment standpoint, this holding hasn't been exactly a gangbuster, off around 2.7% since the year began.

But, as it happens, worried as he might be about his country's exposure to the possible consequences of its huge hoard of our IOUs, it's not entirely clear what, beyond scolding us for our profligacy, Mr. Wen can do about it.

A shift into other governments' bonds doesn't seem too attractive (Germany's and France's, for example, are off more than three times as much as our Treasuries), and the Chinese haven't fared very well venturing into our equity market (think Blackstone, where its investment of over $10 billion has been cut in half).

Moreover, any precipitous dumping of Treasuries would do serious damage to the sizable chunk of that $696 billion pile of such paper it would inevitably still be holding.

It might stop adding to its stash of Treasuries, of course, but even here, the symbiotic relationship between the U.S. and China -- we buy the stuff they turn out and they lend us the money to do so -- makes that a pretty dicey alternative.

As Morgan Stanley's Stephen Roach trenchantly observed recently, while "the original excesses were made in America," where consumers went on a wild binge, fueled by the credit and housing bubbles, the rest of the world, and particularly China, "was delighted to go along for the ride."

To feed our voracious appetite for consumption, we ran massive trade and current deficits, importing surplus savings from abroad. And that, he laments, seemed a perfect fit for the developing countries of Asia, whose exports exceeded a record 45% of the region's gross domestic product in 2007.

What's more, it was China "that led the charge," boosting its exports to 40% of GDP, double the percentage seven years earlier.

And while Beijing is prodding the banks with some success (this is, remember, a "command economy") to lend more liberally, a lot of the companies to which loans are going seem to be stockpiling the dough. For that matter, the absence of anything resembling a real safety net in China compels its populace to save rather than spend, manifestly a mixed blessing for an economy straining for recovery.

As strongly intimated by the swoon in exports, the savage global slump already has left its ugly imprint on China. Countless plants have been shut down, and millions have lost their jobs, sending many of them straggling back to the rural areas whence they came. Aggravating the plight of these restive souls is that the country has fallen prey to a major drought.

Mr. Wen has vowed, if necessary, to toss more of the nation's $2 trillion in foreign reserves at the economy, should that $585 billion already pledged fail to do the trick. And we're not predicting an apocalypse for China any more than we are for our struggling fair land.

Pure and simple, our point is that, contrary to the wishful notion so widely bruited about Wall Street, China is scarcely invulnerable to the powerful vortical pull of the global recession. It is not slated to somehow regain its momentum and prosper on its own.

And so we heartily concur with Albert Edwards that the bullish consensus that China might just be the place for anxious investors to ride out the storm is poppycock, if not piffle.